Why advanced driver training makes teens worse drivers

It may seem counter-intuitive, but a new study says advanced driving schools that teach emergency manoeuvres only increase the risk of teen driving collisions

by
David Booth | April 1, 2016

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It turns out that pretty much everything I thought I knew about driver training was wrong.

Like so many parents, as soon as my basement troll turned 16, I enrolled him in every driver-training course I could find. Skid control school? Check. Emergency accident avoidance techniques? Absolutely. Winter driving instruction? Get behind the wheel, sonny boy. I even got him into a — admittedly it was as much Christmas present as educational instruction — BMW Performance Driving School, which emphasized handling a car in emergency situations at high speeds. My logic — or maybe it was just the blind desperation that overwhelms every parent handing over the car keys for the very first time — was that the experience he lacked in the real world could be made up with the concentrated tutelage of track instruction.

What I accomplished — says the International Road Federation, an NGO that studies the effectiveness of driver training — was the exact opposite. Indeed, according to the IRF, my ministrations all but guaranteed he would have an accident.

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It’s no mystery that the young, especially testosterone-filled males, are over-represented in accident statistics. In the United States, some six teenagers die every day in car accidents. In Canada, road crashes account for about 30 per cent of all deaths for young adults between the ages of 16 and 24.

Nor is this only a North American problem. Overall, the average in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries shows that young drivers make up 27 per cent of all driver fatalities, despite accounting for only 10 per cent of the driving population.

Now, here’s the kicker: According to the IRF, driver skills training — especially those emergency skill-based curriculums such as skid control, etc. — actually increases the likelihood your offspring will be involved in an automobile accident.

“But,” I can hear you saying, “that simply doesn’t make any sense.” And you’d be absolutely right; it doesn’t seem to make any sense at all. Surely, the eggheads have it wrong. It would seem plain, ordinary common sense — at least, viewed through a parental lens — that the reason teenagers are so vulnerable is that they lack experience behind the wheel. How can they know, for instance, that you steer into a skid if they haven’t, well, practiced steering into skids. Ditto brake-and-swerve accident avoidance manoeuvres, how to operate anti-lock brake systems in emergency situations and the multitude of other skills experienced drivers take for granted. That is why, after all, we concerned parents send those nearest and dearest to us to driver’s school.

Experience on the track may backfire

Yet the IRF is adamant, the premise of its entire report that training programs geared to enhancing “the skills to regain control in emergency situations should not be included in basic driver education nor in post-test driver training programs.”

And it has the numbers to back this seemingly counter-intuitive assertion. Studies in Norway and Finland have shown a direct correlation between skid recovery training and increased crashes among novice drivers. A similar study in Oregon estimated that such training doubled the likelihood of the young driver being in a collision. One analysis even reported that emergency skills training for ambulance drivers actually increased their crash rate by 45 per cent.

According to the IRF, the most important criterion for safe driving is a perfect balance between risks and capabilities, regardless of what those capabilities are. Actually, it’s even deeper than that: Safe driving is actually the balance between risks and perceived capabilities. Indeed, says the IRF, it’s only when “both the perceived capabilities completely coincide with the real capabilities, and the perceived risks completely coincide with the real risks” that a driver is said to be “well calibrated,” the goal of every modern driver training program.

Counterproductive, says the IRF, is what skills training does, namely imbuing “overconfidence [that] eliminates normally cautious behaviour.” Not only that, those advanced skills, quickly learned, also tend to erode over time and “not be readily available in emergency situations one or two years later.” As an example, says the IRF, when it’s dark and it snows, “a driver who has attended skid training may think ‘I have learned to control a car in difficult circumstances’ (although he or she has actually already lost those skills) and drive,” but someone who has not attended such a course may think, “I’m not such a good driver and I cannot control a car on slippery roads and will stay home.”

So, if enhancing driving skills isn’t effective, what does work?

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Well, besides graduated licensing which tends to phase in the responsibility of driving or raising the minimum age for driving to 18 (as some European countries do), it would seem that the greatest boon to driving safety is teaching novice drivers to recognize dangerous situations. Indeed, if I am reading these studies right, it turns out that what’s killing our teenagers isn’t so much that they don’t know what to do in an accident, it’s that they don’t know an accident is actually happening. Or, to be more accurate, they don’t recognize an accident is about to happen.

Perception — no mystery here to parents — isn’t a key teenage strength. Just as numerous studies reveal that teens have a difficult time “reading” facial expressions that adults quickly decipher, virtually all research into the perils of driving indicates that teens simply have trouble perceiving the dangers of driving. The good news is that some of the same papers reveal that driving simulators that focus on recognizing — and avoiding — critical situations are far more effective than trying to imbue our callow youth with the skills of a race car driver (such lessons have the added benefit of being far safer than on-road instruction).

From an adult perspective, though, it may be hard to believe that your progeny can’t recognize danger. I certainly had a hard time wrapping my head around it. Who couldn’t, for instance, see that a loaded-to-the-gills pickup barreling up to a stop sign might warrant a little extra attention? Or that spotting a toddler — looking at her soccer ball scooting across the street, no less — requires a heightened degree of caution? And who wouldn’t move over to the left lane and slow down a tad if they spotted a harried taxi about to pull out from a curb? Who could possibly miss such obvious signs of danger?

Your teenager, as it turns out.

Showing our kids how to avoid accidents is not going to save lives. Teaching them how to recognize danger might.